After the robot toy explosion of the early eighties, nearly every toy company attempted to cash in on the craze. While Matchbox licensed a number of Japanese properties (Voltron, Dairrugger), it also developed its own domestic robot property. Kind of.

The Parasites wedded transforming alien robots to Matchbox’s bread and butter, the traditional 1/64 diecast car, a baffling and ultimately unsuccessful premise. As the story goes, Parasites were space creatures who inhabited the shells of earth vehicles. It’s a fun narrative, but creating two distinct toy components at the Matchbox car scale was probably too ambitious, and the toys turned out to be pretty clumsy. But funky!

Specterite is the leader of the Parasites. He is packaged on a standard eighties bubble-card. The artwork on the front is fantastic, a painting reminiscent of the Micronaut cards (more on the Micronauts later).

The back of the card features transformation instructions, pictures of the other toys in the line, and a file card.

Specterite’s shell is a pickup truck with large wheels. The truck body is diecast. The chassis is mostly plastic, with a metal plate along its length for structure. The quality of the vehicle is noticeably cheaper than proper matchbox or Hot Wheels vehicles.

You can see pieces of Specterite hanging out of the truck bed, and his head is visible in the cabin.

The truck body, with Specterite folded inside, detaches from the chassis. The bot is easily removed. There is no transformation per se, you just unfold the parasite into his humanoid mode.

Specterite is a fun, if middling figure. His stubby little arms are kind of a joke, and only move in one direction. His legs are reasonably well articulated, with hip, knee, and ankle joints. However you pose him, he never seems to look “right.”

Specterite can ride the vehicle chassis like a skateboard.

As a toy, Specterite is pretty limited, a strange novelty. But as a design, he’s wonderful. The Parasites, you see, are the direct descendents of the beloved Micronaut aliens. While many of the Micronaut toys were just rebranded Microman, all of the organic aliens and vehicles were designed in the US By Stephen Lee and California R&D. Lee also designed the humble Parasites, and they feel like distant cousins to Antron, Lobros and the gang. I love Specterite's angular head, chrome accents, and molded details.

Your typical robot fanboy probably doesn’t have any interest in the Parasites, but for Micro-fans, these are a real gem.

Comments

Is it just me,or does this dude remind you of the robot in Jabba's palace's basement that was burning the Gonk droid's feet?
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A master of mind control who hides inside a Ford Pickup

Hey, nice score. Actually I feel Specterite is the least well-executed of the Parasites line (but still like it for all its quirks).

I talked with Larry Jones from California R&D about the series some since then and he says they were less than impressed with how Matchbox handled the manufacturing on the final product, but also that they were having a lot of problems in general by that point. Cal R&D did also design the packaging and the whole pitch though with the wacky back-story (Halley's Comet? Talk about a narrow release window! I guess even they didn't expect the series to last more than a year).

Looking at this one, you can see that there's some joints that were intended (like on the back of the grill) that were left as one piece. Of the six toys, three have riveted and screwed together parts and are more solid construction with really good articulation, and three (including this one) are more cheaply made and are entirely snap fit. So some of these figures are much more nicely realized than others. If you were happy with this one with its somewhat gimped design, I'm sure you'll be happier with the other 5 toys. Gammasite is the only other one that feels really cheap to me, but is a little better posable than Specterite. Terrorsite, the snake one, is similarly snap-fit parts and cheaper material, but makes up for it with its other features in my book.

The best thing I like about these guys though is if you ignore the car scale, they are perfectly sized to go with 1:18 action figures and fit very nicely in with the Micronaut aliens. :D And heck, Microman used a similar idea with its Titan Command Gimca cars (perhaps another point of inspiration for Cal R&D?), not to mention Transformers' own Pretenders later.

I need to update that Flickr gallery (and do my long-promised blog review). I have all the figures now and better replacements of my two battered ones (though one I've left on its mint unpunched card). Being both unpopular and only having six toys in the run makes for a very easy and inexpensive set to score in the wild. :D

Edit: Forgot to mention, I took mine and popped it apart and reassembled the grill and legs into a "fanmode" configuration I personally think looks much better, with the chrome shin guards facing outward and the grill worn as a backpack. :D

Until I saw this review, I forgot that these things even existed, and I had like three of them!

...I kind of forgot how crappy they were. I think that these turned up by the time my parents had decided to quit buying me Transformers because I wasn't going to do anything but obsessively transform them back and forth until all the limbs fell off.

I was wondering how long it would be for someone to bring this up... I had one of the hot-wheels ones that turned into a chubby F1 car and liked it alot. This Parasite has some serious vintage funk tho, and is new to me. CDX is gonna make me broke.

This is just plain crap IMO. I mean,the package says robot,and when I look at it I can kind of make out a humanoid shape,but it really just looks like someone took small parts from a much bigger toy and slapped 'em together.

Even if it did look ok,what's the point? At this point there were already Transformers,GoBots,Convertors,and a hundred other brands where a car could turn into a robot-it sort of seems like a step back to make a robot you just fold up and place inside the cheapest,most generic-est Hot Wheels I have ever seen.

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A master of mind control who hides inside a Ford Pickup